


Draw a White Chalk Baphomet

by lurrel



Category: Dig (TV)
Genre: M/M, ineffective doomsday cults
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-19
Updated: 2015-12-19
Packaged: 2018-05-07 14:23:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5459648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lurrel/pseuds/lurrel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peter Connelly has heard two things:</p><p>One, there's a new rapture cult in Jerusalem.<br/>Two, Golan Cohen is still alive.</p><p>Golan Cohen hears a knock at the door.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Draw a White Chalk Baphomet

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Venturous](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Venturous/gifts).



Golan Cohen knows, at the back of his mind, that this whole thing is inevitable, but when there's a knock at his door it still seems too soon. Honestly, he hoped he was wrong, that no one would resurface, but this visitor arriving while his face is still bruised from dying seems a little rude.

He opens the door anyway, and just like he thought, there's Peter Connelly, looked well-rested and red-faced and incredulous.

“You!” he half-shouts, and Golan steps back, waves his arm to let him into the flat.

“I saw you...I saw your body.” Connelly says this as though it carries some weight of truth, as though everything in the past few months was as clear-cut as dead or alive.

“I’m not the only one you’ve seen come back from the dead this year,” he says, letting the door slam shut. “It can’t be that much of a surprise.”

Peter paces around the living room before stopping to stare.

“Giddy is at school, right?”

Golan nods slowly. “If you’re here, that means you’re still on the hook for math tutoring.” He’s sure he’s barely approximating a smile, but Peter will have to cope.

Peter laughs, choked but real enough.

“This calls for drinks,” Golan says.

They start with shots of Arak and settle in the living room with bottles of Goldstar, and Golan reminds himself that he is, in fact, alive. He can still get drunk; he could, in theory, still have friends.

“I still can’t believe you’re here,” Peter says. “I _saw_ you. I spoke to your uncle!”

Golan shrugs. “Maybe I was less dead than you thought. Maybe my uncle’s piety actually led to a miracle. Who can say what really happened?”

"I figured you'd be able to." Peter lets his head hit the back of the couch, eyes closed. “After all, you were there."

“To tell you the truth, I try not to dwell on it.” He raises his glass, and Peter reluctantly follows suit, an unenthusiastic toast. “It seems morbid.”

Peter takes a long drought, then looks at him sharply. “How’d Udi take it?”

“My resurrection? He was thrilled. With the recovery...not so much.” Golan shrugs again. He feels the alcohol working now, thinks maybe Peter’s face is getting flushed. He feels less on edge than he thinks he should. “There’s not much romance in putting the pieces back together.” He takes a drink. “He’s not a bad guy, though, you understand. He’s one of the best.”

“Sometimes you have to protect yourself,” Peter takes a drink. “Or that’s what my ex told told me.”

“Ah, see, I knew you had experience here.”

Peter lets out a long sigh. “Some.”

Golan doesn’t want to dwell, doesn’t want to think about it all, and that's hard with Peter sitting right next to him. “So what brings you to back to Jerusalem? I expected you to leave and never look back, after...everything.” It isn't exactly true, but he’d _hoped_ the man would have found some sense by now, known to stay away. Why go to where trouble can find you?

“Shouldn’t you be in some kind of Israeli Witness Protection Program? New name, new identity, something to keep you safe?”

Golan laughs and shakes his head. “Connelly, if someone wanted me dead, I’d be dead by now.” He touches his throat, pink scar visible under the collar of his shirt, and then jerks his hand away.

“It’s not for lack of trying.”

Golan waves his hand dismissively. “Shin Bet has a department on these things, and since now I’m considered a foremost expert on doomsday cults, I got recruited. They decided I was worth more alive and myself then dead and someone else.”

“Ah.” Peter looks for a second like he wants to say something, but then he takes another drink.

“Ah,” Golan mimics. “Why did you come back? Trying to get that FBI promotion? Trying to steal another one of my cases?”

“I’m not,” Peter says, “I’m a consultant, I’m not here for--”

Golan shakes his head, waves a hand at him to stop. “You’re here, which means you’re being an idiot. If you were smart, you’d be in America. Europe, maybe. Somewhere safe.”

Peter rolls his eyes. “Nowhere’s safe,” he says, “You should know that.”

The thing is, Golan does.

-

Peter comes back in the morning, after Giddy is at school. Golan doesn’t go into the office every day, and he doesn’t that day because he knows Peter, knows he’ll be back.

“So,” Peter says when Golan opens the door, and then, “Partner?”

“You want in on a Knights Templar case?” 

Peter comes inside, drops a binder on his kitchen table. “Sure.”

“Is someone at the FBI punishing you?” It’s too early for this, but he supposes he did open the door. It’s one of those cases that never really closes, just gets new players. The guys on their radar are low-level thugs, not conspiracy puppet masters. There’s no Pastor Billingham here, no ambassadors, no plot to blow up the city. Just some Satanists, maybe. 

“I’ll take small-fry. As long as there aren’t any cows or kids in this one, I’m happy to work it.”

He shrugs, wonders if he should make coffee. He's not sure how Peter takes his. “Not yet, anyway. There’s no telling if there’s some other ancient text hidden somewhere. The latest group is interested in the secret rapture, But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, that kind of thing. They might be hoping for an anti-Christ.”

“2 Peter 3:10, yeah. Doesn’t seem like this one has deep roots. Hopefully it’s not a top-level conspiracy.” Peter grins but it's fake. Golan thinks maybe Peter is as exhausted as he feels.

Instead of asking, Golan says, “Speaking of, does your boss know you’re here?” He doesn’t want to deal with a bureaucratic nightmare if he can help it.

“She’s not my boss anymore. We’re in different divisions.”

“But you’re not an agent anymore.”

Peter coughs. “Not exactly. It's complicated."

Golan raises his hands in surrender. “Oh, I see, even more classified than before? This is why you’re a pain to work with, you know.”

“You’re not exactly a peach yourself.”

“I didn’t try to steal your cases. I definitely never slept with a mastermind of a murder plot.” This is one of the few concrete truths he has from the past few months.

Peter concedes the point, shrugging.

“So do you want my help on this or what?” he asks instead, and Golan sighs.

He does. He’s wanted it ever since he figured out the day that Peter would be back.

“Get in the car.”

-

“Everyone here is staring at me,” Peter says, leaning against a wall in Golan’s office at the police station.

“That’s because no one here likes you.” Golan clicks through the login process on his computer. His office looks the same, same photographs, same chairs, same monitor. Same everything as before he died. It's less comforting than having the same Peter there, if he's honest, but Golan doesn't want to be honest with himself.

“Right,” Peter snorts. “I guess getting the boss almost-killed doesn’t make you Mr. Popular.”

“No, plenty of people have almost gotten me killed. I’m a cop, after all. They all just know you’re an asshole.”

“Real nice, Golan, real nice.”

“I’m not here to be nice,” he says, but he's actually already pulling favors for the American, bringing him into a case he barely wants to touch. But that’s the price of dying, he’d been told, everything'll be fine as long as he keeps his skills up. They even let him stay with his old department, on-call for specialty cases as-needed.

The other cops were told his death was faked for national security reasons, and for the most part they accepted it. That doesn't stop Golan from feeling guilty about lying, or keep interdepartment relations from being strained. This stunt isn't going to help.

Golan lights a cigarette so he doesn’t have to think about how fucked up everything is going to be now that he’s brought Peter Connelly back into his office. He just wants to feel normal, and Peter sniping at him feels as normal as he thinks he’ll get.

“Is it good for someone with your condition to smoke?” Peter asks as Golan pulls up a few CCTV photos, starts printing a few profiles.

“My condition?” Golan breathes in. “Do you think the smoke is going to start pouring out of my neck or make me more dead?” He doesn’t say that it was an initial concern of his, definitely doesn’t say that he’s worried he _is_ still dead. Doesn’t even think that last part.

Peter shrugs. “Yes. No. I don’t know. Look, to be honest, I’m kind of freaking out here.”

“No, no, you’re doing a great job of keeping your cool and being professional. It’s perfectly in-character, in fact.”

Peter makes an exasperated sound and sits down backward in one of Golan’s chairs, grabbing some printouts.

“So what motivates someone to bring about a seven-year tribulation?” Peter asks, shuffling through some mug shots. “These guys seem pretty street-level -- shoplifting, pickpocketing, nothing major that screams ‘Waiting for seven years of tribulations.’”

“They’re easy to recruit, probably easy to convince they’re working for a noble cause. Jews in Israel get Rapture’d first, according to some interpretations, you know. After the great global war.”

“You know none of that is based in scripture, right?”

Golan snorts. “Like that’s mattered to anyone in these cults before.”

-

They have to interview a shoplifter who tried to walk out with some high-end gold jewelry downtown, but had a horned goat pin on the inside of his jacket. The drive takes time. Peter is fidgety, drumming his fingers against his knee.

“You need to calm down,” Golan says after fifteen minutes of unbearable annoyance. “We’re not really on a deadline right now.”

“That’s doesn’t mean I like sitting in traffic.”

“I don’t know. It kind of feels like old times, only we both know what the hell is going on.”

“You might,” Peter says, looking out the window. “I’m still not positive I know what’s going on with you.”

“I guess we’ve switched places, then.”

“I told you everything eventually,” Peter says, and Golan can almost taste his guilt in those words.

“Do you think my death was your fault?” Golan asks, more sharply than he means to.

Peter purses his lips, looks like he’s going to jump out of the car for a second. Like he wants to.

“It wasn’t?” he finally says, meeting his eyes.

“Fuck off,” Golan says. “You didn’t kill me. You didn’t want me dead. I agreed to stay on the case.”

Peter doesn’t respond. He drums his fingers for a while instead, eventually asking. “Do you think it would have worked?”

Golan gives him a sidelong look. “What?”

“Their ritual. The prophecy. Do you think something would have happened if they’d killed that heifer?”

Golan snorts. “Are you asking me if I actually think making a 13-year-old slaughter a red calf could bring about the end of the world?”

“You’re alive, aren’t you? That miracle didn’t make you believe?”

“Maybe somebody’s faith kept me alive, but it wasn’t mine.”

“You’re impossible.”

“You’re the one that showed up at my house unannounced. You could be a spy, for all I know.”

Peter scoffs at that, and then grabs Golan’s pack of Noblesses and lights one.

It doesn’t go well -- he coughs immediately, hitting himself in the chest. “Jesus, how do you smoke these things?”

Golan laughs. “Carefully.”

-

The interview ends with the kid pledging his allegiance to the Knights Templar, Baphomet, Jesus Christ, and possibly a heavy metal band. The local deputy is extremely apologetic and promises to get them a tox screen as soon as they can.

Peter seems disappointed. Golan takes him to get drunk, and they drink until Peter passes out on his couch, where he stays for a few more nights.

It’s more reassuring than Golan would admit out loud. The house is mostly quiet unless it’s his week to have Giddy, the custody agreement changed up after his miraculous resurrection.

His ex-wife still doesn’t believe him, and he can feel it in his chest when they talk on the phone -- she’s afraid of him now, of the scar on his neck, fearful _for_ Giddy. He doesn’t blame her, even if the secrets she thinks he's keeping are the safest ones.

-

There’s less intrigue in this doomsday cult than the web of secrets they’d uncovered before, which is kind of a relief even if it makes Peter twitchy. He does have time this go-around to come over and show Giddy how to to finish his math homework, which is a also a relief. Dying did not unlock any secret algebraic skills in Golan's brain.

Peter keeps coming around, even though there's not much to do. He makes Giddy laugh, and that makes Golan's chest feel tight, either a rising panic or something he can't discern. He smokes on the balcony and ignores the fact that he's probably never going win a father of the year award.

-

“Sometimes these things never come to fruition at all. It’s a slow beat, to be sure,” says his higher-up at Shin Bet.

Peter doesn't buy into that, of course, still running around with a gun, staying up too late, ruffling the feathers of witnesses. It’s infuriating how predictable he is, but his intel is good.

“You don’t need to keep the American around, you know,” says his deputy at the precinct, as they were ostensibly investigating a string of jewelry thefts. “I think one good call to Special Agent Monahan and he’d be gone.”

“I don’t need him to disappear,” Golan says, drinking espresso and wondering why so many people wanted the world to crumble in a fiery mass or to bring about the second coming of Jesus or whatever the motivation was. “I just want him to chill out.”

The thing is, Peter's a good cop when he's not hiding a million of his own secrets. He's good at patterns, fast with insights. Golan trusts him, to have his back, and to keep himself out of too much trouble.

Things feel easy.

Then they find a whole nest of these guys, leather vests and Satanic-looking goat charms, and one nicks Peter in the shoulder with a bullet before he’s tackled and arrested.

-

Golan visits him in the hospital and then gives him a week to rest up.

-

Peter shows up right on time, and Golan doesn’t ask himself how he knows that seven days would be as long as he’d stay away.

Instead, he scowls at him, which makes Peter mad. They don’t get anywhere on the case, clues not lining up and everything feels misaligned.

“Look, you need to get over it. It was nothing, I’m fine, that kid was an asshole,” Peter says, shoving off Golan’s concern with an irritated look.

“You need to take care of yourself.”

“You’re one to talk, Cohen,” he says, frowning, getting up from the kitchen like he’s going to leave. “I’m fine!”

“You’re a stupid asshole!” Golan snaps, getting up. He shoves Peter’s shoulders, knocking him the short distance to the wall. “You think you have any more lives to lose?”

It's exactly like the first time Golan shoved him against the wall, except this time he leans in, presses their mouths together, and Peter shuts up.

Peter is a good a kisser, has strong hands that dig into his shoulder, has a weight Golan hasn’t felt in too long.

It’s easy to get Peter out of his shirt and into bed, easier than he expected, if he'd let himself think of this. His shoulder isn’t even bandaged, the lucky bastard, but once Golan’s shirt is off Peter hesitates in touching him.

“It’s fine,” Golan says, grabbing his wrist. “I won’t break.” He pulls Peter down on top to show him, grinds against his hardening cock, but Peter is gentler when he kisses him. His gun-calloused hands are tentative, and Golan wants more of them.

“I don’t need you to baby me,” Golan growls, biting his bottom lip, getting a gasp in return.

“I’m not,” Peter says. “Maybe I just want to make love.” It's a joke, and a bad one, but he keeps touching tentatively, each glance of his hands a tease that makes Golan ache for more. His mouth is too hot, too rough for Peter to be so hesitant.

Golan rolls his hips and relishes the next gasp, and he digs his fingers into the meat of Peter’s ass for more friction. His nerves are shot, like his body doesn't know what to do with the input, but the heat of Peter's body feels good, his hardness new and wild against his own cock.

“Don’t fuck with me,” he says into his ear, biting at that too. They both have enough stubble for it to be rough, a rasp against his skin that Golan’s missed when their mouths meet.

“I’m doing my best,” Peter finally pants out, and he fumbles his hand down between the two of them, grabbing at Golan’s cock and his own.

His grip is firm, finally, and Golan let's the pleasure flood his brain. It’s good, it’s better than it should be, really, considering despite a mutual respect he still finds Peter infuriating. It’s messy, too, just rutting against each other and biting kisses, Peter’s hand jerking them both in an awkward and unpracticed rhythm.

But it doesn’t take either of them long to come, panting and sweaty against each other. Golan jerks with orgasm, feeling strung out and over sensitive as Peter keeps jacking them off until he comes, too, a sticky mess on his hand and both their bellies. Peter flops next to him on the bed and Golan feels at ease, even with his heart beating loud in his chest.

It takes him a while to recognize the feeling, it’s been so long since he’s had it.

 

“Why didn’t we do this before?” Golan asks after he lights a cigarette. “I think we could have worked off your tension better.”

“I don’t like to mix business and pleasure,” Peter says, deadpan.

Golan laughs outright at that. “I know that’s not true.”

Peter grins, but says, “You seemed happy before. I needed to get my head straight.”

“Oh, and your head’s straight now?” Golan breathes smoke, looks at the ceiling and wonders what that would feel like.

“No,” Peter says.

“At least you’re learning to be honest.”

“And what about you? Are you happy now?”

Golan shrugs. “I’m alive.”

Peter stretches, arms behind his head, and Golan takes a moment to admire his chest. He’s slightly more toned than he remembered, but they both have to be in shape for a living so that’s not too much of a surprise. Maybe not living in a hotel was good for him.

“Did you come back for the job?” Golan asks after a companionable silence.

“No,” Peter says, and then, “Fuck.”

“I could tell you were coming back.” Golan rubs his thumb against his own sternum, over the tattoo right over his heart.

Peter notices, of course, and he reaches over, tracing Golan’s fingers.

“I thought you couldn’t get a tattoo.”

“You’d be shocked to hear,” Golan says, “that not all members of the Jewish faith are strict adherents to every single one of its tenets.”

Peter raises an eyebrow, and Golan wants to kiss the corner of his smirk, so he does.

“Besides,” Golan says, “tattoos are permanent. Much safer than chalk or paint.”

Peter’s eyebrows raise, and Golan can almost hear the gears turning. He wonders if Connelly will put it together, and almost laughs when he asks, “What’s it say?”

“אמת. Truth.”

“As in, your pursuit of?”

Golan shrugs, grabs onto Peter’s fingers and moves them to his belly. “Something like that.”

-

Later, they drink coffee and watch the news and it feels normal, if normal were a real word with a definition that could include Golan. His shoulders don’t feel tight with anticipation anymore, he doesn’t feel restless. He knows Peter has a gun and he knows that he’s alive. His heart beats, his blood flows, his cock still works.

Peter asks, “What happens when these guys get it right? What if there’s a prophecy that’s true?”

Golan shrugs. “Then maybe it’ll be time. Or maybe we’ll stop it.” It’s what he’s there to do, after all. Everything else is a bonus.

“What if we’re not meant to.”

“Do you think,” Golan says, “that an omnipotent being couldn’t stop you? Or do you think you're so clever you could stop the actual apocalypse?”

“Death couldn’t stop --”

“Ha ha,” Golan says, cutting him off. “You need to get over it. This kind of thing happens all the time in Giddy’s comic books.”

Peter presses a hand to Golan’s chest, and Golan thinks he’s going to ask another question, ask something there’s no answer to.

He leans over and kisses him instead.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for requesting this show! I spent the whole thing shipping these two and it was great to revisit them and their scrappy relationship.


End file.
